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By: Cydney Anderson
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Darwin's grandfather asked, "Would it be too bold to imagine ... that all warm-blooded animals have arisen from one-living fillament?"
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Naturalist Georges Cuvier attempted to explain fossiles found in the early 19th century. He said that great flood and earthquakes wiped out certain life in the distant past.
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Charles Lyell argues that slow-moving, gradual porcesses explain Earth's geology. His mentor wrote that Earth's history has "no vestige of a beginning. No prospect of an end."
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Only a few years after On the Origin of Specles is published, evolution is mainstream science Magazines and newpapers promote evolution. Darwin's theory constinues to be doubted.
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Darwin now unabashedly takes on human evolution. HIs new book stresses the importance of "secual selection" in driving the evolution of life. To pass along traits to future generations, individuals mush be not only fit to survive, but also irresistible to the opposite sex.
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Othniel Charles Marsh had discovered stunning fossils of ancient horses. Thomas Huxley and Marsh piece together the story of the evoultion of the modern horse from a four-toed ancestor. Huxley and Marsh predicted that a more ancient, five-toed animal likely existed, and months later, fossils of such an animals, called Eohippus, are discovered.
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Physicist Antonie Henri Becquerel discovered radioactivity and this leads to a stunning calculations of Earth's age. New rock-dating techniques show that Earth is more than 4.3 billion years old.
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Rayond Dart announced that a prehistoric "man-like ape" had been found in a limestone quarry at Taungs, South Africa. The fossils were found with a skull of a ancient baboon that had a mysterious opening. Dart made the speculation that the clever "man-like ape" killed the baboon and extracted its brain for food.
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DDT was widely used in the early 1940s. It was primarily used to batle the mosquitos that spreads malaria. Just as the Darwinian theory would predict, those insects with traits that allowed them to survive increase in numbers.
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With electric currents to act as lightning and a soup of inogranic chemicals to simulate the conitions of ancient Earth, a young graduate students named STanley Miller produces amino actids -- key chemical building blocks of life. This experiemtn, and other to follow, indicate that the first life on Earth may have arisen through natural processes.
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